The abstractions and protections an API can provide are entirely fueled by the language its implementation (and its consumers) is written in, however. Is this not the case?
-Ian
----- Original Message -----
From: "Grant Rettke" <grettke at acm.org>
To: "racket" <users at racket-lang.org>
Sent: Wednesday, May 9, 2012 3:42:06 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: [racket] The value of a language
Hi,
Hope this is on topic, if it is not a substantive contribution I apologize.
I just want to share a conversation from work. Bunch of experienced
developers who are all very thoughtful reached the conclusion that the
most important thing in a language choice is the APIs that come with
it. Basically talking through it, that is the thing that speeds up
work, and people can basically "think in any language they like" and
then "mentally compile it down" to whatever is the implementation
language. I generally agree in a corporate environment because you do
want save your customers time and therefore money and I have never
tried a non-mainstream language there such that I had real evidence
there is a more productive way to do things.
This was the same day that I finally read about syntax/parse and was
thinking about how much nicer it would be to use that than the
plumbing work I had to do to get nice error reporting, so perhaps I
was more struck with their observation. It was just funny to hear
everybody keep saying "the language doesn't matter" because it is so
different than how I think, and how I think other lispers think, and
even PLT people in general.
I thought this was a funny coincidence because I wanted to talk about
how great syntax/parse, and well I did talk to my one buddy about it
:).
Best wishes,
Grant
--
http://www.wisdomandwonder.com/
ACM, AMA, COG, IEEE
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